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When Do Memories Begin?

New Findings Show Babies Develop Short-Term Memory in Utero

Aug 14, 2009 Brenda Lane

Dutch researchers have discovered that babies in utero show recognition and memory as early as ten weeks before they are born.

When does your baby start to develop short-term memory? At 1 or 2 years of age? The answer might surprise you. New research shows that babies have short-term memory ability as early as 30 weeks of pregnancy.

Vibroacoustic Stimulation Used to Test Babies' Memories

How were researchers able to discover that babies in utero have the ability for short-term memory? Ninety-three women from the Netherlands took part in this study. The babies received vibroacoustic stimulation (from the outside of the mother's abdomen) at 30, 32, 34, 36 and 38 weeks of pregnancy. The stimulation combined a vibration with an acoustic noise. Each baby was tested for one second every thirty seconds until the baby no longer responded to the noise/vibration stimulation.

Researchers Find that Babies Use Habituation to Adapt to Stimulation

When the babies no longer respond to the vibroacoustic stimulation, this is known as habituation. The babies become familiar with the stimulation, (in this case, the vibration and noise combination) and treat it as "safe" so they no longer react to it.

Habituation can be seen by new parents by observing their baby's reaction to a variety of common external stimuli or noises. If you live near a train station or you have barking dogs, you will discover after your baby is born that he/she has already habituated to those sounds from the months in the womb.

Rather than being started by those loud environmental noises, the baby likely does not react at all to them. In some cases, parents might notice that their babies sleep right through those disruptive noises since they have already heard them in utero. As this study demonstrates, after time babies learn to habituate to these sounds and have identified them as safe.

Dutch Researchers Unlock the Secret of Babies' Memories

One of the most fascinating results of this study was that it showed that babies as early as 30 weeks were able to habituate or "remember" that the vibroacoustic stimulation was familiar 10 minutes later. Even more amazing is that only 4 weeks later, babies at 34 weeks' gestation could remember these familiar sounds that were introduced to them 4 weeks prior!

This exciting research is but one more example of how incredibly complex humans are even when they are still developing in the fetal period. If short-term memory begins at a rudimentary level at 30 weeks of pregnancy, what more will we discover in the future about the development of growing babies?

The copyright of the article When Do Memories Begin? in Pregnancy & Childbirth is owned by Brenda Lane. Permission to republish When Do Memories Begin? in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.